GOP reform has to come before policy reform

I didn’t hear the broadcast but evidently our Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was on the radio in Illinois this week endorsing Mark Kirk for the U.S. Senate. With that, Steele joins the knuckleheads at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington and the corrupt old guard players here at our own state GOP.

Websites like RepublicanNewsWatch.com have been telling the truth about Mark Kirk for many months now. The reality that the national campaign committee and state and national party officials ignore the Kirk’s record shows just how much they don’t understand a simple fact. The party doesn’t exist to win elections. It exists to win elections with the goal of advancing an agenda based on our party’s platform principles.

Republican primaries belong to rank and file Republican voters – not to the party bosses. Any time a township, county, state or national party chairman endorses a candidate in a primary, they are revealing their confusion about their role and the job of the GOP.

A colleague recently asked a good question: aren’t Republicans supposed to be in favor of states’ rights, federalism, and local control? Evidently that doesn’t apply when it comes to party politics or primary elections. The NRSC, NRCC and the RNC want to govern politically from D.C.

Democrat Party failures only get us so far – Republican leaders have to show some spine and lead.

“[L]ast week our unaccountable State Central Committee jams the inappropriate Pat Brady into the State Chairmanship in a pre-rigged vote. This was 14 months after the same unaccountable State Central Committee gave Brady the Republican National Committeeman post in another pre-rigged affair at the state convention in Decatur last year.

Incredibly not a single GOP candidate says a peep. And they want to pretend they are going to find the spine to take on Mike Madigan and the Democrats? They won’t even lift a finger to fix their own house. They aren’t even trying to make winning a realistic possibility.

[I]t’s looking like all of our statewide GOP candidates are satisfied just going through the motions yet again…”

Short of political reform – which we won’t see if none of our would-be leaders has a backbone – expect more of the same from our government policy makers.

expanding government control and regulation of as many things as possible,

raising taxes,

expanding the size of government,

and reducing the choices individuals are allowed.

A few facts from DuPont:

“The Treasury reports that our country’s federal debt has doubled in nine years, rising steadily, year by year, to $10.72 trillion from $5.67 trillion in 2000.

Our deficit for the current year fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is expected to total $1.8 trillion, four times last year’s figure, leaving us with a federal debt of $38,500 for every U.S. resident.”

DuPont also quotes the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore: “it would take almost $16,000 more from every household in America to balance the budget this year.”

How can our government’s policies be so foolish? It’s because Republicans continue to fail to get their political house in order. It’s not rocket science, folks. Elections come before governing. The Republican Party, nationally and in Illinois, continues to be led by people who are clearly not the best nor the brightest.

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“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” —James Madison (1792)